I'll Be Watching You (14 page)

I

So Ned took a right into Karen’s parking lot. He parked his car. “Hey,” he said as Karen got out of her car, no doubt unnerved by his presence.

“Hey,” she said. Karen was startled. She wanted nothing to do with Ned. Philip was going to be calling and/or coming over at any moment. It would be awkward, the two of them. Ned and Philip.

According to what Ned later said—an authority we should probably not take too seriously—Karen walked up to his vehicle and said, “Can you come in?”

She was not, he later insisted, surprised to see him.

“Sure,” Ned said.

II

Walking into Karen’s apartment, Ned had to think that whatever was going to happen next was not going to turn out positively. He understood those feelings of violence he was having and knew the triggers. Going into Karen’s apartment was an episode waiting to happen. There could be no two ways about it.

It was possible that Karen invited Ned in that night. There was never a sign that he had forced his way into her apartment. Maybe Karen thought that she
could
be friends with Ned. Maybe introducing Philip to him would finally cut the cord? But whatever the reason, she had known Ned for about three years and dated him for half that time.

He was certainly no stranger.

And Ned, of course, used this vulnerability to his advantage—something he would become an expert at in the coming years.

When they got inside, Ned said, Karen was the aggressor—again, something Ned would later associate with the women he met and the violence he perpetrated. “We started kissing,” Ned explained. Then Karen, Ned insisted, took off her shirt and bra, and that was when Ned saw Karen’s breasts and lost all control of himself as the sight of her breasts brought out that
other
person in Ned.

Seeing Karen topless set off a series of receptors. Once that happened, there was no turning back.

Ned’s heart raced.

Then “these scenes in my mind began to take over,” as they had so many times before, Ned said. He and Karen “rolled” around sexily on Karen’s bed, he claimed.

Then they fell off.

At first, it was funny. A roll in the hay had taken them for a ride over the edge of the bed and onto the carpet.

How romantic. He claimed they laughed about it.

Ned, though, in his own way—comparable to no one, I should note—explained away his actions, claiming that when they landed on the carpet, his hands just
happened
—it’s worth repeating:
his hands just happened
—to end up on the side of Karen’s face.

When Ned found himself with his hands so close to Karen’s neck, he said, he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t control himself. The power of being so close to taking a life became overwhelming. There was that adrenaline rush again. That drug.

That unmanageable urge to kill.

My hands,
he wrote,
just ended up wrapping around her throat.

His hands just
ended up
wrapping around her throat.

When that happened, Ned said, he just
had
to begin squeezing. What else could he do? It was almost as if it were in slow motion. Karen’s feet weren’t even off the bed at this point.

And Ned began to choke her.

Without one bit of compassion.

Without a second thought.

Without any sense of remorse.

He knew what he was doing. He knew Karen’s life would be over. And he knew that he could—if he really wanted—stop himself. But all he thought at that exact moment, he later admitted, that exact moment when he held the power of life and death in his hands, was
I’m actually doing it this time.

To Ned, it was no longer a fantasy. He had crossed the threshold into reality.

I

Ned was not a drug user. He drank, sure, but he wasn’t a guy who liked to get bombed and stumble all over the place. Ned’s highs in life came from those moments when he held a female’s life in his delicate hands and chose her time to die. Thus, as he choked Karen, that “dizziness” and shortness of breath, which he would describe in the years to come, was a sense of empowerment, a euphoria like no other he had ever experienced.

“Something inside me likes these feelings,” he later said.

Moreover, he wanted those feelings to increase. To never end. In fact, there was no drug or drink in the world that could replace this high of taking a life. The feeling of losing grip with reality and taking the breath from another human being was enormously stimulating for Ned.

He was God.

How liberating.

Glorifying.

II

At some point, Karen began to realize what was happening. That Ned was killing her. She was no match at five feet three inches, 115 pounds, even if Ned was no giant himself.
I held Karen’s throat,
Ned wrote later,
pressing down with my thumbs…but she was still sputtering….

Karen’s eyes were closed, Ned described.
Her tongue stuck out of her mouth.

As she struggled for breath, Ned explained, Karen began to make terrible, animal-like noises.

And it bothered him. He was having trouble strangling Karen to death, he recalled. As he squeezed harder and harder, he began to realize that, for him, killing a human being was much harder than it looked.

At this point, Karen’s life had come down to a psychopath comparing it to that of a scene in a horror film. Karen was twisting and turning, Ned explained. He was looking at her.
Naked from the waist up,
he later wrote, it was “driving” him crazy, allowing him to continue the torture, creating an erection like that of which he had never experienced.

And then, without warning, there was that adrenaline rush: seeing Karen bare-breasted, struggling for life. There came a point, Ned said, as she thrashed like a fish out of water, when Karen just stopped moving, like a machine that had run out of gas.

One minute she was kicking and straining for air…and the next, nothing.

No movement whatsoever.

The problem for Ned, however, was that Karen was still alive.

Staring at her, Ned thought,
She’s going to wake up and call the police.

And there was no way he could allow that to happen.

III

With Karen unconscious, on the floor of her bedroom, Ned had to think fast. If she woke up, she’d realize he’d tried to kill her and immediately phone police.

Ned was no stranger. She could identify him.

He panicked, he later said. And ran into Karen’s kitchen.

Where are they…where are they?
He silently questioned.

Opening drawers and rifling through cabinets…he couldn’t find one.

But then, there it was: a steak knife.

He ran back into the bedroom and, according to what Ned later wrote, he
stabbed her in the abdomen.

Karen had once again began “making those noises,” Ned described. She wasn’t conscious or moving, but she was obviously still alive.

This, he said, made him “so scared.”

Imagine this: Karen was dying and Ned Snelgrove was
scared.
Still, even more revolting in its reflection, what scared Ned more than anything, more than anything that had taken place that entire night in Karen’s bedroom, what had totally turned him off by the entire ordeal, he later explained, was a “yellow mucus” drooling from Karen’s mouth and the blood now vigorously flowing from her abdomen.

All that blood.

All that mucus.

It wasn’t, Ned said, supposed to happen this way. It wasn’t part of the scene he had envisioned for all those years. No, he wrote, it was
never part of my sexual fantasies.

For Ned, seeing all the blood “ruined it” for him.

It had drained the sexual drive from him.

IV

Ned needed to get the heck out of Karen Osmun’s apartment. Not that the murder had been loud—but it was Christmas. People would be looking for Karen. Her phone would be ringing.

And Philip…

Ned grabbed Karen’s keys and the steak knife that he later said he used to stab her to death and ran from the apartment. Within a few moments, he was at home cleaning himself up, preparing to leave for Connecticut to spend the holidays at home.

I

By 3:30
P.M
. on Saturday, December 24, 1983, Christmas Eve day, Elizabeth Anne, Arthur Bilger, and Karen’s boyfriend, Philip, had not heard from Karen. It was so unlike her. Here it was Christmas Eve day and she was nowhere to be found.

Maybe she went out shopping?

No one was panicking yet.

But when Christmas Eve came and went, and it was getting late into the night and early Christmas Day morning, the family became frighteningly concerned. Barbara, pregnant, spent the previous night at her in-laws, and Arthur and Elizabeth Anne agreed not to tell her what was going on, for fear that she didn’t need any of the stress. At some point, Barbara called home, however. “We’ll be there tomorrow, Mom,” she said with holiday cheer in her voice.

Elizabeth Anne was somber. “OK” was all she said. Barbara didn’t recognize that her mother was overly worried about anything. (“You know, in retrospect,” Barbara said, “who is really looking for that?”)

II

Late into Christmas Day, the family was still in a frenzy:
Where in the world is Karen?
They kept calling her apartment. “Frantically,” one of them later said.

No answer.

They called several of Karen’s friends—anyone who might know where she was, but no one had seen or heard from her.

Elizabeth Anne’s intuition told her that something was terribly wrong. Karen was in trouble. She had said she’d be there by “late afternoon” on Christmas Eve day. They hadn’t heard from her in almost forty-eight hours.

Elizabeth Anne wasn’t waiting any longer. She picked up the phone and called the New Brunswick Police Department (NBPD). “Can you send a car over to my daughter’s apartment and check in on her? She was supposed to be here this afternoon and hasn’t arrived yet.”

“Ma’am,” she was told, “your daughter’s an adult. We can only check outside her apartment.”

III

At Karen’s apartment some time later, two officers rang Karen’s doorbell and knocked on her door.

No answer.

They tried again.

“Miss Osmun,” one of them yelled into the window, “you home?”

Nothing.

It was now close to 10:00
P.M
. “Nothing happening here,” one of the officers called in and told dispatch. “Seems to be no foul play or anything.”

IV

Elizabeth Anne and Karen’s stepfather, Arthur, called Karen’s boyfriend, Philip, who was at his parents’ house. “Can you go over there and check on her?”

Philip said he would.

Arthur said he’d meet him there.

V

Elizabeth Anne knew. She had been worried sick by this point, as were other members of Karen’s immediate family. There was no way Karen had run off anywhere on her own. It was Christmastime. She wouldn’t have missed the celebration with family for anything.

Philip met Arthur at Karen’s door sometime after the police left.

They both knocked and rang the buzzer, yelling for Karen.

Not a peep.

It was snowing by this point. Cold and wet. Visibility was dim. The streets were getting slick. Philip had an idea. “I’ll be back,” he said.

There was a way to hop up onto the roof and look into Karen’s window to see if maybe she was in there or things looked odd. Philip didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he figured, what the heck, it couldn’t hurt.

Philip pulled himself up onto the roof and shimmied his way down so he could manage a glimpse into the window. It was slippery, but he was able to make it. There were curtains, however, blocking his view.

Shoot.

“I’ll get a screwdriver,” Arthur said. He went to his car and dug through the trunk.

According to a detailed police report, based on interviews with Arthur and Philip, it took a few minutes, but they were able to jimmy the door open and walk in.

Philip entered first.

After looking around, he went into the bedroom, where, he later told police, “I saw a green sleeping bag spread on the floor with what appeared to be a body lying underneath it.”

He walked over and lifted the end of the sleeping bag up, quickly seeing the feet of a female. Yet, he didn’t know for certain that it was Karen’s feet, so he lifted the upper portion of the sleeping bag off her face.

My God!

There she was.

Dead.

Philip stood. Tears. Shaking. Disbelief.

“In here…”

There were tiny puncture wounds to her chest. Blood all over the floor underneath her body. Light purple-and-blue-and-red bruises around her neck.

After the shock of seeing Karen just lying there dead, with dried blood all over her, Philip and Arthur put the sleeping bag back the way Philip said he had found it and “did not,” they explained later, “touch anything else in the apartment.”